A general-purpose small internal combustion engine (hereinafter simply referred to as an engine) often includes a recoil starter for starting the engine. The recoil starter rotates a crankshaft of the engine to start by quickly and greatly pulling a pull rope with a grip provided at a tip.
The aforementioned recoil starter generally includes a pull rope reel and a ratchet, as main components. A pull rope is wound around the pull rope reel. The pull rope reel converts linear motion of pulling the pull rope into rotational motion. The pull rope reel is equipped with a pull rope winding mechanism such as a rolling spring, and it is possible to easily store the pulled pull rope.
The ratchet transmits the rotation of the pull rope reel to the crankshaft of the engine when pulling out the pull rope. The ratchet is mainly equipped with a ratchet pawl and a ratchet wheel.
The ratchet pawl is disposed on a radially outer side of the ratchet wheel. The ratchet pawl is able to swing between an engaged position where the ratchet pawl engages with a protrusion provided on the outer peripheral portion of the ratchet wheel and a disengaged position where the ratchet pawl does not engage with the protrusion. The ratchet pawl is always urged toward the engaged position side by a spring or the like, and, for example, when the engine is stopped, the ratchet pawl is disposed at the engaged position. On the other hand, when the engine is started and reaches a sufficient engine speed, the ratchet pawl swings in the direction of resisting the urging force by the centrifugal force of the rotation, and is displaced to the disengaged position.
A reaction force from the ratchet wheel acts on the ratchet pawl at the time of starting the engine. When it is attempted to secure sufficient strength against the reaction force of the ratchet wheel, the size of the swinging shaft of the ratchet pawl increases, and the size of the recoil starter itself increases.
Patent Document 1 discloses a recoil starter in which an outer wall for supporting a reaction force from a ratchet wheel is formed outside a base portion of a ratchet pawl. In this way, when the ratchet transmits rotation to the crankshaft, the reaction force received by the ratchet pawl can be supported not only by the swinging shaft but also by the outer wall on the base portion side of the ratchet pawl.